Thursday, February 12, 2009

A PENNY FOR YOUR THOUGHTS

1909-S VDB Lincoln cent.

Happy 200th Birthday, Abe!

It was 100 years ago that the familiar Lincoln cent was created to mark the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday.

The coin you see above, from the first year of issue, was made in San Francisco and bears the initials of the coin’s designer, Victor David Brenner. Only 484,000 of these babies were made before the initials were removed due to a public outcry over the designer’s supposed egotism. (This injustice was corrected eight years later, when they were returned to the coin in a much less conspicuous spot.) The rarest regular-issue Lincoln cent, a 1909-S-VDB in the condition shown above will set you back at least a couple of thousand dollars today.

[It’s also Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday today. People are still pissing and moaning about his ideas in a manner reminiscent of the Roman Catholic Church’s treatment of Galileo, who dared to propound the Copernican theory of a heliocentric solar system... which idea was felt to conflict with the literal interpretation of Scripture. Likewise, Darwin’s concepts of evolution and natural selection do not fit with a literal reading of Scripture. Me, I think Scriptural literalists suffer from a failure to recognize some of the greatest divine gifts, those of human intelligence and imagination... and the ability to construct timeless stories rich in allegory and metaphor.

Evolution: the Providential tool of choice for the ongoing work of Creation!]